Platform Engineering Experts in Germany

Maturing their API practices on both a business and technology level. My role covers strategy, architecture, developer advocacy as well as hands-on software engineering, enabling both technical teams and business leadership to adopt and act on API-centric principles effectively. Coincidentally, we also establish GitOps, DX and platform best practices with this project.

Highlights:

• Aligning executives with the initiative by clarifying strategy, replacing misconceptions and myths with facts, clarifying the value of existing assets and enabling informed decision-making
• Formulating a way forward for API Lifecycle Management at OTTO
• Driving platform progress and fostering developer engagement by hands-on engineering work towards strategic goals

API Lifecycle Management, Team Topologies, Organizational Evolution, Regulatory, Platform Advocate, Developer Platform, Communities of Practice, Terraform, Kotlin, Kafka, Kong, WSO2, Apigee, Gravitee, Backstage, AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, API Design, AWS, React, Node.js, TypeScript, Redocly, reactive programming, CDC, Golang, Gin, GitOps, DX (developer experience), stakeholder management, roadmaps, workshops, discovery.

• Worked as freelance Senior DevOps Consultant on-site for IBM at a European Union Agency, operating in a highly secure, air-gapped environment managing classified systems.
• Led automation and DevOps initiatives for a large-scale OpenShift platform (>400 nodes), driving deployment efficiency, GitOps adoption, and operational automation using Ansible, Python, and Bash while ensuring compliance with security requirements.
• Spearheaded automation of release and deployment workflows in a private cloud environment hosting 400+ OpenShift nodes, significantly improving deployment speed and reliability.
• Migrated existing playbooks, roles, and templates from Ansible Tower to Ansible Automation Platform (AAP), ensuring full compliance with fully-qualified collection names (FQCN) and preparing custom Execution Environments (EE) for containerized automation.
• Implemented GitOps Agent for AAP Controller Configuration as Code, enabling automated synchronization (CRUD) of Ansible Controller objects based on repository-stored configuration definitions using GitHub webhooks.
• Designed and automated complex multi-step operational workflows including environment cleanup, Helix cluster component re-creation, Kafka topic management, and OpenShift object lifecycle management across ~100 environments.
• Achieved a reduction of multi-day manual operations to under a few hours through automation improvements spanning multiple AAP clusters and OpenShift environments.
• Integrated Ansible Automation Platform with Thycotic (Delinea) Secret Server via lookup plugin to enhance secure credential management in automated processes.
• Managed deployment tasks, platform troubleshooting, and Istio network configurations while adhering to stringent EU PSC security and compliance standards.
• Collaborated with infrastructure and application teams to refine deployment procedures, develop naming conventions, and continuously improve automation coverage in an air-gapped, classified environment.

• Responsible for the backlog and roadmap of a production SaaS compliance platform for the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), with around 30 customers on AWS and Docker.
• Coordinated feature development and API integrations across 2 external and internal development teams.
• API integrations with the EU EUDR API and SAP.
• 70% fewer customer-reported issues, supporting ISO-27001 certification.

• Kubernetes: EKS management, cluster upgrades and stability improvements, Infrastructure-as-Code reviews and updates, AWS support, and cost optimization.

• Led migration to GCP using Terraform, GKE, and GitOps, improving deployment consistency and scalability
• Implemented Datadog observability stack via Terraform and datadog-operator
• Established automated end-to-end tests and on-call processes, improving incident response and service reliability
• Migrated from NGINX Ingress Controller to Kubernetes Gateway API (NGINX Gateway Fabric)
• Migrated stateful services (PostgreSQL and Redis) to GCP, improving scalability and operational reliability

Task:

• Design and build a proof of concept (PoC) for a future-proof virtualization platform, taking secure system architectures into account
• Assess the current state of existing infrastructures and develop selection and evaluation criteria for the right OS virtualization platform
• Carry out the requirements analysis and then create and prioritize tickets in the ticket system
• Complete and continuously update a tool evaluation matrix based on PoC results
• Support team knowledge building through clear documentation of the approach and results in Confluence
• Enterprise analysis of existing hardware (creating different BoMs)

Technologies: Vmware, Vmware Aria Operations, Osism, Canonical OpenStack, FishOs, Linux, Terraform, Ansible, Confluence, Alma

Independent engineering practice focused on custom AI systems, production delivery, and fractional technical leadership.

Selected client engagement: Scalutions

• Role: Serve as fractional CTO and hands-on technical lead, responsible for the architecture and agentic infrastructure behind its managed B2B outbound operation.

• Product: Designed and built OutboundLoop, an agentic SDR operating system for research, qualification, personalized outreach, campaign management, human approvals, measurement, and continuous improvement.

• Scope: Own the full system lifecycle—from business processes and agent behavior to context design, model routing, integrations, evaluation, telemetry, reliability, cost control, and production operations.

Manufacturing intelligence platform with enterprise workflows, RAG, real-time AI assistant features, and multi-repository backend architecture.

• Built and extended production AI/backend services with Django, DRF, FastAPI, GraphQL, Celery, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and WebSockets across a modular multi-repository platform.
• Contributed to ARIS V2, a real-time manufacturing AI assistant using LangChain, LangGraph, MCP tool orchestration, planning/execution flows, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Qdrant, and Elasticsearch/OpenSearch-backed retrieval.
• Supported rollout expansion from ARIS V1 in 4 of 17 client production plants to ARIS V2 currently active in 13 of 17 plants, increasing real-world deployment coverage to more than 50% of the client footprint.
• Worked on document-grounded RAG functionality including ingestion, OCR, chunking, embeddings, indexing, retrieval, reranking, and grounded answer generation for industrial workflows.

Stack: Python, Django, DRF, FastAPI, LangChain, LangGraph, GraphQL, Celery, WebSockets, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Qdrant, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Docker.

• Design and build of a fully isolated AWS offline environment with no outbound internet access for running a browser-based business application
• Design and implementation of a proxy and response service that terminates all external application calls inside the VPC and serves them from locally stored content; identification of the actual communication needs through measurement-based DNS query logging
• Creation of architecture designs and decision papers including a comparison of options (Application Load Balancer with Lambda and S3, reverse proxy on EC2, private API Gateway) assessed by operational effort, cost, and availability
• Transfer of the solution and operations documentation previously available only for Azure to an AWS target architecture, including reassignment of all services and operational processes
• Automated rollout as Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) with CI deployment via GitHub Actions, plus setup of private DNS zones and an internal certificate chain for operation without internet access
• Creation of architecture, deployment, and operations documentation and handover to the customer
• Build-up of a private cloud platform on OpenStack at provider TelemaxX with Terraform, including FortiGate HA clusters, FortiManager, and Kubernetes
• Introduction of Policy as Code (Open Policy Agent, Conftest) as well as development of MCP servers (Model Context Protocol) to connect AI assistants to operations and project tools

Successes:

• Made the business application fully operable without internet access for the first time; the cause of the loading error was narrowed down systematically to missing CORS headers after the likely certificate issue was ruled out
• Fully transferred an existing Azure concept to AWS and replaced the manually created environment with a reproducible, CI-based rollout

Technology stack: AWS (VPC, Application Load Balancer, Lambda, S3, Route 53 private hosted zones and Resolver query logging, IAM, CloudWatch, EC2, CloudFormation), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Remote State), CI/CD (GitHub Actions with OIDC, Azure DevOps Pipelines), OpenStack, FortiGate, FortiManager, Kubernetes, Policy as Code (Open Policy Agent, Conftest), offline and air-gap architectures, PKI & certificates (internal CA, TLS, CRL/OCSP), DNS, network segmentation, Linux, Windows Server, Python, Bash, PowerShell, YAML, JSON, architecture design & decision papers, documentation (Confluence, Markdown), Generative & Agentic AI (Model Context Protocol, Agentic AI Coding Tools)

Built and operated the entire infrastructure and observability platform for an AI agent evaluation platform on AWS/Kubernetes. Led the evolution of an AI-first cloud-native platform by building end-to-end observability, automating infrastructure and CI/CD, improving reliability and scalability, optimizing performance through data-driven engineering, and operating in an AI-native development workflow centered on rapid iteration, code review, and automation. Tech stack included Terraform, AWS, Kubernetes, Grafana, Github Actions, Python, and Cursor.

• Manage multiple Kubernetes clusters in Production with Ceph as storage layer.
• Implemented CICD pipelines for automating deployments with Gitlab CI
• Terraform for Infrastructure provisioning.
• Claude code
• Helm charts for deploying via ArgoCD
• Implemented automated incident notification pipelines in Kubernetes to align with NIS2 mandatory 24-hour early warning disclosure rules
• Configured Azure Policy and Logging guardrails aligned with BSI IT-Grundschutz (SYS.1.3 / OPS.1.1), ensuring continuous baseline compliance across 50+ cloud workloads

Environment: Gitlab CI, IONOS Cloud, Ceph, ArgoCD, terraform, Elastic cluster, Grafana, Alert Manager & Prometheus

• PRISMA project
• Ansible automation
• Windows third-level support for Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2013, Windows 2016, Windows 2019

• Designed and implemented a hybrid recommendation system (content-based + collaborative filtering)
• Built end-to-end ML pipelines including data processing, feature engineering, model training, and evaluation
• Developed RAG-based LLM systems using LangChain and vector databases for semantic search and knowledge retrieval
• Established MLOps workflows with MLflow for experiment tracking, versioning, and deployment readiness
• Implemented deep learning models (computer vision & classification) using PyTorch and TensorFlow

• Bedrock technology operations role providing the foundations on which PUMA's global product teams build PUMA.com and associated systems
• Managed a €3.5 million CAPEX portfolio including ~20 externals and 16 platform and tooling vendors
• Started up and led five functional teams for platform engineering, cloud administration, edge technology, continuous performance testing, and L2 support / incident management
• Person of last resort for mysteries, intractable bugs, compliance crises, litigation support, and black-hole issues where ownership was unclear or contested
• Sole author and driver of a multi-million-euro, multi-year RFP for Global Operations Center serving the direct-to-consumer technology estate for eCommerce, order management, and brick-and-mortar retail tech support
• Conceived, designed, developed and productionized Order Viewer, a secure internal application providing observability into PUMA.com order data at sub-second latency; independently delivered architecture, implementation, GCP deployment, SSO integration and organizational compliance.